Sacha Kahir has been working on writing, performances and arts research over the last couple of years. Sacha’s writing has appeared in various journals including Cesura//Acceso and Mute. He has also been working with NK Berlin on a series of reading groups in collaboration with a group of experimental musicians, in which philosophical texts are translated into scores for performances.

Radiant

Work in progress with Adam Read, ACUD (Berlin), Schloss Bröllin (Germany), Ars Electronica Center (Linz, Austria), adapting themes from Soviet era Russian Sci – Fi novel ‘Roadside Picnic’, by the Strugatsky brothers, into a series of site specific events incorporating live performance and video installation. Exploring our world, which is littered with objects, and transforming it by creating zones emanating an alien effect, where things can mutate into the miraculous, or…? Funded by Pflasterspektakel Production Scholarship 2013.

(Dis)chorus, LUX (AAP)

Nominated artist to work with 2012’s LUX Associate Artists Programme. (Dis)chorus was a group project exploring individual dissonance within the chorus of group dynamics and artistic production. It used improvisation, theory, singing, games, recording, mimicry, brewing, massage, and sometimes a hybrid mixture of these forms. Funded by The Leverhulme Trust.

What is the sound of the border?

What is the sound of the Border was a series of experiments in collaborative arts practice, exploring sound and field recordings as an educational tool. Working with asylum seekers in Glasgow it built on practise developed by the international sound art collective Ultra Red, involving shared experiences of listening and recording, the project explored themes of space, language and common ground.

In collaboration with Arika, Sacha Kahir and members of Ultra Red worked at Unity Café and with residents at Red Road over the period of a year, running workshops and exploring a variety of subjects and objects with participants through recording sound around the city.

The Process

Sacha Kahir | UK | 2011 | 21 minutes

The Process is a ghost story, where dead labour is resurrected through a therapeutic process. Made with a group of ex-homeless people in Dunfermline, and set in a non-place somewhere between a ghost town and the clinic. The film explores themes of memory and identity on both a personal and social level. Examining the industrial warehousing of the poor in institutions and sink estates, it uses distanciation to create a constantly shifting narrative, where the various subjective experiences of those involved intertwine.

Negativnights - Edinburgh Printmakers

Visual and Performance Art and Curation

A series of weekly screenings of underground and experimental artist films.

Re-education: failure to adapt may lead to punitive measures being taken was a bricolage of video, sound and performance examining systems of control from religious cults to media scares to social engineering (medication was provided).

An Orgy of Appearance and Disappearance showed a series of short films followed by discussion of reality in an ever-accelerating orgy of images and what it might mean for media, politics and everyday life.

Heavy Metal Mouth - Polarcap

Visual Art - in collaboration with Hyperground

One of 13 artists invited to repsond to the following text by the participating artist Norman Shaw:

"Heavy metal culture represents an attitude which is not generally connected with fine art. Yet from cock-rock to black metal, it is an extremely nuanced, contradictory, and complex organism, mutated on currents of northern romanticism, sublime melancholy, gothic horror, expressionism, fin-de-siècle occultism, surrealist eroticism, and existential doom. From extreme violence to delicate sensitivity, from complexity to minimalism, it is a kind of anti-art with a unique identity; misanthropic, tasteless and belligerent.

Object\Subject - Pilton Video Edinburgh

Documentary

A whirlwind study of lives on the margins and in the footnotes of Edinburgh's recent history. Edinburgh - the overdeveloped world’s first city of the split personality, home of Jekyll and Hyde, reason, science, grave robbing, economics and heroin.

Edinburgh produces 90% of the world’s legal medical heroin and the programme explores the economics of heroin and the poverty industry, and how the fragments of people’s lives connect to dramatic global events.

Object/Subject is in spite of everything a testimony to the strength of ordinary people, the heroes and victims of war and addiction.

Black Sun Over Genoa - Theatre Workshop Edinburgh

Visual Art and Video Animation

Based on doccumentarty accounts, this powerful play portayed the hope, the passion,the dedication of the protestors in the face of overwhelming opposition and reveals the tragedy of a young man who made the ultimate sacrifice for his belief in a better world.

Motion Sickness - BBC

A surreal black comedy about a young Asian man in the midst of a panic attack, trapped on a train and surrounded by white Xmas shoppers. If Motion Sickness were a facial expression it would be a snarl but with tearful eyes.

This is where we say goodbye - Highway Diner

Visual Art - The Arches, Glasgow

A sensual multi-track world of visual poetry and moving surfaces where things we take for granted become strange once more.